Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Everybody saw this coming.

“Squeaker” McCarthy

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

I really should read my own blog.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

The GOP is a fucking disgrace.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Happy indictment week to all who celebrate!

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Sunday Morning Open Thread: Good Work

Sunday Morning Open Thread: Good Work

by | 138 Comments

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All of these stories could be separate posts, but there’s so much news happening these days…

======


Last April, in a farm field in eastern Virginia, Ann Richardson gathered with a few hundred people for a celebration. It wasn’t a party, though. Several people were crying. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland was there. She was crying, too.

“I can’t really describe it,” Richardson said of that day’s event, which took place along the shores of the Rappahannock River. “Incredible. Surreal. Emotional.”

“I felt like we were surrounded by ancestors who had lived there thousands of years ago. We were standing in their hopes and their dreams for their people.”

Richardson is the chief of the Rappahannock Tribe, and on that Friday afternoon, her tribe took back more than 460 acres of ancestral land along the river that shares her tribe’s name. Last month, her tribe reclaimed another 960 acres of its homeland, too.

It took 350 years. It took survival, after her tribe was forced off of its homeland by English settlers in the 1600s, virtually erased by white supremacists in the 1900s and endured centuries of persecution sanctioned by the U.S. government.

It also took a new kind of partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, as the Biden administration forges ahead with what it hopes will spur a seismic shift in the way the government approaches managing public lands: inviting tribes to be co-stewards of the land their ancestors were forcibly or illegally removed from by the government.

Since President Joe Biden took office, Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack have signed off on nearly two dozen co-stewardship agreements with tribes. There are another 60 co-stewardship agreements in various stages of review involving 45 tribes. Haaland and Vilsack launched this effort in November 2021 with a joint secretarial order directing relevant agencies to make sure their decisions on public lands fulfilled trust obligations with tribes. In November 2022, the Commerce Department signed onto their order as well.

The Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have since produced a co-stewardship guidance document, too…

======

… The phased-in reduction in the overtime pay threshold will begin Jan. 1, dropping from 60 hours a week to 56 hours a week. Overtime will further be lowered by four hours every two years until it reaches 40 hours a week by 2032.

“These new regulations ensure equity for farm workers, who are the very backbone of our agriculture sector,” Labor Commissioner Roberta Reardon said in a statement. “By implementing a gradual transition, we are giving farmers time to make the appropriate adjustments. These new regulations advance New York State’s continued commitment to workers while protecting our farms.”

The final approval Wednesday ends a three-year process where a Farm Laborers Wage Board held public hearings to decide how to improve working conditions for farmers in a state with one of the nation’s largest agricultural sectors.

Farmworkers’ rights groups have long said it is unfair that employees on farms, who are often migrants, should have to work 60 hours a week before getting overtime. Some farmers have argued that they provide other benefits, such as food and housing to their workers, to offset the high threshold for overtime.

To address the cost to farms by the lower overtime threshold, Hochul and the state Legislature last year increased an investment tax credit from 4 percent to 20 percent and a refundable tax credit for the overtime hours.

Still, Republicans railed against the measure…

======

Reader Interactions

138Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    I’m skeptical the ERA will go anywhere. It’s got a built in time limit.

    I would like to see people start working on a generational project of creating a bill of rights for the modern era.

  5. 5.

    Matt McIrvin

    The ERA seems more impossible now than it did in the 1970s.

    I remember fearmongering about unisex bathrooms. The more things change…

  9. 9.

    Baud

    @sab:

    It’s not a legal issue. Amending the constitution is a political issue. It’s something young people can work on so they can accomplish it by the time they are old.

  10. 10.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: The time limit was amended before; it can be changed again, so I don’t think that’s the big obstacle to ERA ratification. IMO, the problem is the U.S. is regressing on women’s equality, and the Senate gives veto power to the reactionaries who are dragging us backward.

  12. 12.

    gene108

    @WereBear:

    Many of those states would overturn their ratification, if given a chance because they are run by modern Republicans.

    I doubt the political will is there to force the issue.

  13. 13.

    gene108

    @Betty Cracker:

    The time limit was amended before; it can be changed again, so I don’t think that’s the big obstacle to ERA ratification.

    Missouri pops to mind as a state that ratified the ERA 50 years ago that’d like to un-ratify their vote today. There are others.

    I’m sure there’d be wrangling over letting states get a do over to increase time to ratify, if Congress wanted to extend the ratification process.

    @Baud:

    If they can get it done, I’m for it. I do think we need an ERA 2.0 that’s not limited to sex, though.

    Maybe when Gen Z rules America, they can agree on the basics of what needs to be done to amend the Constitution. Us older generations aren’t up to the challenge of building a national consensus on anything.

  15. 15.

    Betty Cracker

    Yesterday in Florida politics:

    As former Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried addressed Florida Democrats in Maitland, she wore a Mockingjay pin from “The Hunger Games.” In the books and related films, the icon was worn by the protagonist, a symbol of a revolution against a failed Capitol oppressing citizens subjugated for a matter of decades.

    Like Katniss Everdeen, Fried now must bring together a group of voters in disparate parts of the state. Nearly 30 years after Democrats last won the Governor’s mansion, and months after Fried lost a bid for that job herself, she must bring together people most connected today by a shared experience of perpetual losses.

    Hunger Games — sure, why not. ;-)

  16. 16.

    Geminid

    Politico put up a short article last night titled, “Florida Dems elect Nikki Fried to lead party after ‘horrific November.’ ”

    Thee also was another Florida-related article in Politico about attendees at a fundraising diner hosted by Governor DeSantis last night in Palm Beach. The reporter noted a number of former Trump supporters in attendence, members of Congress as well as big donors.

  18. 18.

    Betty Cracker

    @gene108: The real obstacle is there’s no solid consensus that women are fully equal human beings in this country. I remember hearing about the ERA when I was a small child. Its ratification seems less likely now than it did then. We’re going backwards.

  19. 19.

    OzarkHillbilly

    This being an open thread, I thought I’d raise your blood pressure to the danger zone.

    Colorado sheriff honors deputy after he killed man who mistakenly got in wrong car

    Charles McWhorter earned the Pueblo county sheriff’s office’s purple heart award for purportedly enduring injuries to his nose, forefinger, back, knee and neck as he shot Richard Ward three times at close range and killed him on 22 February 2022. McWhorter received the purple heart medal during a sheriff’s office award ceremony on 17 February, four days before Ward’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court against him and his agency.

    The equivalent of breaking McWhorter’s hand with his face.

    On the day he was killed, Ward accompanied his mother and her boyfriend to pick up his younger brother from a local middle school. Ward took a walk as they waited and – after getting back – opened the door of another car that looked like his mother’s.

    Ward had realized his mistake, had apologized to the driver and had gone back to his mother’s car when deputies including McWhorter showed up to investigate a call about a suspicious person in the area.

    McWhorter approached Ward, who – while being questioned – said he was uncomfortable around law enforcement officers because he claimed some had used excessive force against him, according to deputy body camera footage that Killmer’s office released.

    Ward also explained what happened when he opened the wrong car’s door, and he emptied his pockets when McWhorter asked him for his identification. He also said he might have a pocketknife on him, though it turned out he didn’t have any weapons at all.

    Then, he took out a prescription anti-anxiety pill and put it in his mouth and the tone of the encounter changed palpably.

    McWhorter asked Ward, “What did you just stick in your mouth?” Then, without letting Ward answer, McWhorter wrestled Ward out of the car and threw him on the ground.

    “It was a pill!” Ward said. After a struggle of a few seconds that drew in another deputy, three muffled gunshots erupted, according to the video. McWhorter had shot Ward in the chest at point-blank range, the wrongful death lawsuit filed against the deputy asserts.

    “Is my son shot?” Stamp yelled from the car, the video shows. “He doesn’t have a weapon!”

    Ward was pronounced dead at the scene. McWhorter later claimed that he feared Ward was trying to reach for his gun. And local prosecutors ultimately deemed McWhorter’s killing of Ward as justified.

    Because a cop can shoot anybody at any time for whatever cockamamie reason they can dream up afterwards

  20. 20.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    We are going backwards, but part of the problem is that there are currently almost no discriminatory laws that the ERA would operate against, so people lost interest. As we saw with Dobbs, people often take their rights for granted until they are lost.

  21. 21.

    Geminid

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I think that at the time, the ERA sailed right through 25 or so state legislatures. The next 10 states were harder, and a well organized opposition kept the last 13 from ratifying the Amendment. This became a culture war battle, and now that the Republican party is so deeply into this war some of the states that ratified the Amendment would not now.

    But I think Senate Democrats do well to start this process again, even though passage of an Equal Rights Amendment would not happen for years. Culture war may galvanize the Republican base, but I think culture war tends to marginize the party among the broader public. By championing a new ERA, Democrats open another culture war front, on favorable ground.

  22. 22.

    Betty Cracker

    @Geminid: I’m not sure Fried or anyone else is up to the task of turning FL Dems around any time soon, but I thought she made a fair point in her speech about the catastrophic loss of big donor money, including from national party orgs.

    Fried said the party will focus on down-ballot races to build back up and also concentrate on small donations in communities. She said notching wins is how the party can restore donor faith, which I think is accurate.

  23. 23.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Betty Cracker: We’re in the weird space where a simple majority probably agree that women are equal beings who should have equal rights, at least in an abstract intellectual sense if not in their bones and when it comes to detailed consequences… but a majority-weighted-for-constitutional-inequities does NOT agree, especially when it comes to the high barriers for a constitutional amendment. And the split has hardened.

    It strikes me that a lot of the unthinkable things people used to bring up as a parade of horribles that would follow passage of the ERA have either happened anyway, or if they haven’t happened, have at least become mainstream ideas that people discuss independently of the ERA. Gay rights, trans rights, extending the draft to women (if we had a draft), unisex public restrooms, etc.

    And all this just terrifies a large fraction of the population. Softening gender barriers is like repealing air or gravity to them.

  27. 27.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    I’m skeptical the ERA will go anywhere. It’s got a built in time limit.

    I would like to see people start working on a generational project of creating a bill of rights for the modern era.

    I agree with you on the first, and am with you on the second.

    For right now, I’d like to see the Dems reintroduce the ERA, only including equality with respect to sexual orientation and gender identity (if that’s the best phrase for trans and other genderqueer persons) as well as sex. And the legislative history should state in no uncertain terms that equality unquestionably is understood to apply to gender-specific medical care.

    If the GQP wants a culture war, I say let’s give them a culture war.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist:

    and am with you on the second.

     

    To me, the biggest risk is that we have a lot of (understandably) impatient people on our side, and I am not 100% confident we have the capacity to play the long game. But that shouldn’t deter us from trying.

  30. 30.

    Princess

    I think making Republicans stand up and say they oppose equal rights for women will be helpful for us on a national Level and in some state races. Plenty of women who would never call themselves feminists do assume women and men should have the same rights. And I think the amendment itself would also help trans and non- binary people. So there’s no reason not to press for it enough to make them vocally oppose it.

  34. 34.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    To me, it’s less a matter of the long game, than raising the flag to show where we stand, and forcing the other side to show where they stand.

    I’ve been thinking for years that there are a number of areas where Dems should propose Constitutional amendments for this purpose. One big area would be labor rights. That’s an area where someone familiar with where and why workers have a hard time forming unions and having them recognized could do a way better job of drafting such an amendment than I could, but I can’t help but think that putting such an amendment on the floor of Congress would be a winner for us.

  37. 37.

    Mousebumples

    Postcarding for Wisconsin’s April primary has started!

    WaterGirl had lots of details in this thread last night, and we’ll have another postcard/music thread on Tuesday at about 8pm eastern (blog time)/7pm central.

    I just got a bunch of addresses, though we’re not mailing these until mid March. 😊

  40. 40.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    In Europe, though, the stall doors go from ceiling to floor like real doors. So they’re kind of like several single seaters grouped together.

    There are restrooms like that in BWI now, where each toilet is in its own little room. But they’re still single-sex. Part of that is that in the men’s room, the urinals are still out in the open.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist:

    I agree there’s an immediate symbolic benefit, but I actually want the project to succeed, and that requires some patience.

    There’s also a risk that, while Dems may be unified on legislation, they might not be unified on constitutional amendments yet.  I wouldn’t want the process of building support within the party to become its own distraction.

  42. 42.

    Geminid

    @Betty Cracker: Nikky Fried seems to be an energetic person, and her tenure as party head will be worth watching. Florida Democrats clearly have a long road ahead just to achieve parity with Republicans, maybe a decade long process at best. The 2024 election will be an important waypoint early on, and should show whether Democrats are still sinking, leveling off or even regaining ground in the Florida electorate.

    I’ll be interested in the result in Crist’s old district. Last year’s Democratic candidate may give it another shot and he seems to have the elements of a strong candidate, at least according to article in Florida Politics. The district was redrawn to favor Republicans, but gerrymandering can break down as Crist showed in 2016.

  46. 46.

    Kay

    New Orleans, United States – The half dozen women gathered in the backyard pause for a moment to listen to the television next door. The neighbour is playing a football game at high volume. It’s loud. That’s good – it gives them cover. “I couldn’t hear anything from the sidewalk,” says Ana,* referring to the women’s conversation. “I think we’re OK,” says another. The rest are reassured. In a green yard ringed by banana trees, on a breezy September afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the women introduce themselves using code names. They’ve left their phones at home so they can’t be recorded or tracked.

    This is a clandestine abortion provision group, formed in the wake of Louisiana’s abortion ban to support those who still, inevitably, need abortion care. The fact of the group’s existence was spread by word of mouth, over secure messaging platforms and mentioned to female friends in low voices over drinks. Now, group members sit in a circle around a small wooden table that holds snacks and seltzer water, talking strategy.

    The women, who come from a range of professional backgrounds, are all under 40. They discuss an upcoming virtual training with Paula Rivera*, an organiser from Honduras. A couple of the women, children of Central American immigrants, are fluent Spanish speakers, and they volunteer to translate the training so the English speakers can follow along. Rivera will discuss protocols for delivering safe medication abortions according to World Health Organization (WHO) standards, as well as physical and digital security measures.

    They set a plan for where to do the training and agree to use a secure video platform, Jitsi. “I’d never heard of it,” shrugs Ana. The app is the first tool they pick up from Central American organisers, who have been fighting abortion restrictions for years in their own countries. The knowledge and tactics of these organisers, with their decades of experience, are proving invaluable to those in Louisiana who are fresh to the fight.

  48. 48.

    delphinium

    @Mousebumples: Thanks for the reminder! I commented to WaterGirl last night that I need to get more post cards but will definitely be ready to get some addresses in March.

  49. 49.

    MazeDancer

    Keep thinking about the Commander’s wife in The HandMaid’s Tale and Bobert and Greene.

    The wife worked hard to bring Gilead into being, and then had to submit to nothingness. If, heaven forbid, the GOP ever succeeded in making being a woman, LBGT+, or person of color a crime what would Bobert and Greene do?

  50. 50.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Princess: You mean like saying all GOPs want to cut SS and Medicare so you can get them to all stand up and promise to never cut them on national TV?

    Hmmmmm, it’s a thought. ;-) ;-)

  51. 51.

    Betty Cracker

    @Geminid: Could be an interesting rematch. FL 13th is super gerrymandered, but the incumbent Repub is a kook who lies a lot. I do not and never have lived in that district, but I know the area fairly well. FL 13th is not nearly as hardcore as my district (FL 12th). If we swapped House reps, Repubs could probably keep those seats indefinitely, but there’s a bit of a mismatch currently, IMO.

  52. 52.

    eclare

    Watching Great British Baking Show, the dreaded Mexican week.  As long as they show Sandro, I don’t care.

  53. 53.

    Matt McIrvin

    @MazeDancer: A lot of smaller places where there used to be single-occupancy men’s and women’s restrooms have changed them to be unisex–there’s never more than one customer (or parent with baby) using them anyway. It happened around the same time frame as a lot of larger places putting in family restrooms to make it easier to deal with your baby or toddler.

    I haven’t seen a lot of multiple-occupancy public restrooms in the US going unisex yet. It happens but it’s relatively rare.

  54. 54.

    Tom Levenson

    @Baud: Multiseat ones exist in my institution. The nearest one is the bathroom i use most often on campus, as it is three doors down from my office.

  55. 55.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    I agree there’s an immediate symbolic benefit, but I actually want the project to succeed, and that requires some patience.

    IMHO, one would feed into the other. Forcing GQPers to vote against popular amendments would help us win seats in Congress, and in state legislatures once the amendments passed Congress. And winning those seats helps us ratify the amendments in the states.

    Also too, you can never succeed if you don’t start.

  56. 56.

    kalakal

    @lowtechcyclist:

    If the GQP wants a culture war, I say let’s give them a culture war

    It makes sense to me that as we’re already in a culture war we should try and fight it on our terms, our turf, and our issues rather than constantly playing defense against GQP shit slinging.

    eg Instead of them cancelling ‘woke’ maths text books let’s make it about them banning books, dictating to the normies what they can & cannot read. Lets make them stand up and declare they’re against equal rights. We’ll never convert the hardcore but there’s a lot of politically apathetic people who get fired up when a politician tells them they can’t do something.

    Dem policies are mostly majority popular but the dems aren’t. We need to change the framing which for too long is set by the GQP. They have nothing but made up issues, CRT, Gas Stoves, and tax breaks for their owners

    I

  57. 57.

    Baud

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Forcing GQPers to vote against popular amendments would help us win seats in Congress,

    Assuming people have learned their lesson from Dobbs and believe the GOP the first time when they say what they want to do.

    Also too, you can never succeed if you don’t start.

    Agreed.

  59. 59.

    Cameron

    My only concern with Constitutional amendments is that there is a concerted effort on the Right for a new Constitutional convention. Suppose they pretend to be reasonable and assure Dems that “of course your proposals would be considered” as a way of getting bipartisan support for such a convention?

  60. 60.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    My wife’s perspective on unisex bathrooms is at best a plurality opinion among women:

    ”Men are gross in their public bathroom habits. That includes everybody who spent any time at all being raised as one. Y’all are filthy, and I hate the idea of using one after you.”

  62. 62.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Baud:

    The meteor will strike before we have any meaningful possibility of constitutional reform or rewrites.

    It was a shitty document when created, and it’s a shitty document now.

  63. 63.

    satby

    I’m also very happy that the Biden administration is initiating so many co-stewardship agreements with the indigenous peoples who claim those areas as ancestral lands. It’s long overdue and I hope will limit destruction of those areas.

  66. 66.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: ”Men are gross in their public bathroom habits. That includes everybody who spent any time at all being raised as one. Y’all are filthy, and I hate the idea of using one after you.”

    I spent a year cleaning restaurants on the graveyard shift. Believe it or not, the women’s restroom was worse than the men’s as often as it was better.

  67. 67.

    Betty Cracker

    @eclare: I thought the freak-out about Mexican Week was overblown. It’s true that the judges don’t know doodly-squat about Mexican cooking, but it’s the Great British Baking Show; I don’t expect them to.

    Also, I understand finding the props (serape, etc.) cringe, as the kids say, especially from an American perspective because we have a long and lamentable history and current problem of discrimination against people of Mexican heritage, but I don’t think that issue has the same salience in the UK.

    Over the years, the show has featured cookery from lots of other countries, and the presenters often dress up in silly stereotypical costumes. No one cared when Mel and Sue wore berets and striped shirts, feigned ennui and spoke in goofy Gallic accents.

  70. 70.

    Baud

    Seriously, though, I hope we let the right obsess over unisex bathrooms.  I couldn’t care less.  An ERA wouldn’t prevent private businesses from doing what they want.

  71. 71.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Baud: I doubt very much the GOP would go for one either. They could not control what came out of one any more than the DEMs could.

  72. 72.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Oh, good. Please do. It’s necessarily “word of mouth” organizing because the women involved are at real risk of targeting by anti abortion groups, law enforcement and the state- just like the old days.

  74. 74.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Baud:

    The last substantive amendment is 52 years old now. It could be a grandparent.

    Hell, the last useless process amendment is over 30 years old, and could have kids in middle school….

  78. 78.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Mousebumples:

    yay for postcards!
    in a low turnout election like these, in April of an odd numbered year, we/postcards can really make a difference getting out the vote.

    love all y’all

  79. 79.

    Betty Cracker

    @eclare: Sandro is easy on the eyes for sure! I also miss Mel and Sue. The show has never been the same since they left. Also Mary Berry. She did another cooking show that was pretty good — can’t remember the name, but it was on Hulu (which I no longer have).

  80. 80.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    The sheer volume of existential crises that arose from the very beginning leads me to believe that it was shitty as opposed to flawed. It was a mercantilist construct and purely antimajoritarian.

  81. 81.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Baud:

    Unrelated.

    While there were a relative handful of amendments which conveyed substantive rights (with huge gaps of time in between adoption), the majority of them were small impact process items (and one big impact item – like the two term presidential limit to guarantee that there would be no future FDR).

    The procedure for amendment itself is too cumbersome for the process to be societally useful.

  82. 82.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Geminid:

    @Betty Cracker:
    there are some downballot opportunities overlapping FL-13 for Florida state House and state Senate.
    in 2022
    Eunic Ortiz, 43% of the vote, FL-SD-18
    Janet Varnell Warwick, 44%, FL-HD-061

  88. 88.

    James E Powell

    @Baud:

    I agree there’s an immediate symbolic benefit, but I actually want the project to succeed, and that requires some patience.

    And face to face personal campaigning. I’m convinced that the dramatic swing on gay marriage from 2004 to 2014 came about because people talked to each other.

  90. 90.

    PaulB

    NEWS: Severance agreements that forbid you from speaking out about working conditions or disparaging your employer have been ruled illegal by the NLRB.

    Cool. So I can finally speak out about Microsoft, Amazon and Salesforce?

    (Actually, of the three, Amazon is the only one who tried to apply a gag order to me.)

  92. 92.

    James E Powell

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I spent a year cleaning restaurants on the graveyard shift. Believe it or not, the women’s restroom was worse than the men’s as often as it was better.

    Hey now! I once had the same job & saw the same thing.

  93. 93.

    Feathers

    @Betty Cracker: Mary Berry’s shows pop up with some regularity on weekend afternoons on PBS (at least in Boston).  They also often fill up the half hour after a 90 minute British mystery show like Marple. They know their audience!

    Did have a bit of a laugh at a recent Christmas show though. It was filmed at some enormous country house. The historian stopped the tour for a moment to talk about the ways in which the house and its furnishings were paid for with the proceeds from slave labor. Both women were visibly uncomfortable. I wonder if that aired in the UK as well as the US. They were in an exhibit in the house on the topic, so it was a good thing overall. A fascinating moment to watch. Looking back, I think some of the awkwardness was that their normal “TV face” wasn’t appropriate and they didn’t have a second one for serious topics, the way news people do.

  95. 95.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @James E Powell:

    At my high school, we had partitions between the commodes, but didn’t have doors.

    It was good preparation for my basic training, where we weren’t provided the luxury of partitions – just about a dozen pots in two columns. It was….humbling.

  96. 96.

    Feathers

    @James E Powell: I read somewhere that one of the reasons restaurants made the switch was because both genders appeared to treat the restrooms better if they thought the next person in might be a different one.

  97. 97.

    OzarkHillbilly

    And now a little something to give you the creepy crawlies:

    Medieval medicine: the return to maggots and leeches to treat ailments

    Meet the new medicine – same as the old medicine. In an age where robots can perform hip replacements and livers can be repaired with lab-grown cells, why are ancient practices coming back into favour? Who are the doctors, farmers, professors and patients who have kept our ancestors’ practices alive? And are there more retired remedies hiding in the archives, ready to be revived?

    “There is a taboo that gets in the way of people using the technique,” says Sherman of maggot therapy. “But for many practitioners, once they try their first case – even if it’s a last resort – they see what it can do.” Studies have found that maggots reduce a wound’s surface area and promote healing faster than conventional dressings. Following Sherman’s work and the concurrent work of British doctor Steve Thomas, the NHS accepted the use of maggot therapy in 2004. In 2005, a private company spun out from the Welsh NHS Trust where Thomas worked – ZooBiotic, now BioMonde – a sterile maggot-production facility in Wales that is currently home to 24,000 flies.

    Vicky Phillips, a clinical support manager at BioMonde, educates clinicians about the benefits of maggot therapy. “The larvae will only eat dead tissue,” she explains. BioMonde’s maggots are shipped out in aseptic polyester nets known as BioBags, each one made to order with a patient in mind, the larvae bagged in the morning and shipped in the afternoon in insulated boxes.
    ………………
    So what exactly does maggot therapy feel like? Susan Barnard, a type 1 diabetic who had maggots applied to a foot wound in 2016, says “to begin with, it doesn’t feel like anything, really.” The 48-year-old from Holywood, Northern Ireland, compares BioBags to teabags and says the maggots inside look like grains of rice. But as the maggots fed on Barnard’s wound, they grew, and then she started to feel “a crawling, like how your skin crawls but without the shivers”. Still, she didn’t feel squeamish about the treatment – she was simply amazed, and “actually felt really guilty” that the maggots had to die after they’d eaten her flesh.
    ……………………….
    “What is actually quite novel is to have this collaboration between scientists and people in the arts,” says Lee, an English professor who researches Anglo-Saxon notions of health and disease. Lee stresses that the AncientBiotics team’s work is not about alternative medicine or cooking up lotions and potions to try yourself at home. Instead, it’s about looking for scientifically sound remedies that could inspire modern drug discovery.

    “I was very, very critical,” Lee says of her initial reaction to testing out ancient remedies. “I thought, this is not something that works.” Yet when she and her colleagues tested out a 1,000-year-old Anglo-Saxon treatment for eye infections, they were amazed by the results.

    I had known of maggot treatments but there is much more of interest at the link.

  98. 98.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    On another topic, I broke down and am starting to watch the Netflix Murdaugh thing since wife is out of town with eldest daughter (she doesn’t like long form real life dark subject matter on TV). I had actually considered going to Divine Liturgy at our family Orthodox parish this morning, but much as I like the meditative atmosphere and my various cousins, I just can’t handle even light and kind Christian references of any kind right now (I’m more or less a contemplative atheist) considering what Evangelicals are doing to our society.

    Anyway, I’m an episode in –  what an entitled pack of imbeciles in that family.

  101. 101.

    japa21

    @OzarkHillbilly: I had not heard of this one.  I have no idea how anybody could consider that justified.  If anybody but a cop killed somebody and claimed they had to because they thought the person may have been going for a weapon, that excuse wouldn’t fly.  It would be difficult even in stand your ground states.

    Yes, my blood pressure, which is very normal, did go up.

    Cops are basically telling people we are cowards and afraid of all of you (specially if your skin is even a little dark) so we have to kill you to feel safe.

  104. 104.

    Kay

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:

    My huband and I watched Murdaugh’s testimony and we’re afraid the thing got away from the prosecution. He’s a very practiced liar and the prosecutor was obviously frustrated by it, I think recognizing that Murdaugh was somewhat successful in rehabilitating himself. Ugh. I don’t know that anyone else could do any better – these insane liars are just hard as nails to deal with as we all now know after Trump but I don’t think that portion (the only portion I watched) went well for the state.

  106. 106.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: I wish I was on the jury. I have first hand experience with sociopathic liars and can spot one as soon as they open their mouths. There is always a hole in their stories, something they didn’t think of until it was pointed out to them. In their attempts to fill that hole they inevitably create more. Keep them talking long enough and they will dig their own grave.

  107. 107.

    Kay

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:

    Maybe it was in another part of the trial but we also couldn’t figure out why the state didn’t find out where he spent the money he robbed from clients. I don’t care how many oxis he was taking, he didn’t spend 5 million dollars a year on them. Why didn’t they have his spending records? They had this kind of populist-tinged argument about how he’s a wealthy scumbag thief with a lavish lifestyle but rather than developing that with evidence they ASK HIM – “did you spend all that on drugs?”

  108. 108.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Kay:

    It really comes down to how gullible a Low Country jury can be when hammered with multiple cultural touchstones in testimony. For the parts I watched, the prosecution efforts were pointedly directed at w practice a locate was with his thieving from his clients.

  110. 110.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Kay:

    I suspect it got limited in pretrial rulings – I think that’s a separate set of charges.

  111. 111.

    Kay

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:

    My husband does a lot of trial work and it’s his firm belief that “populism” is not a good approach with a jury pulled from one of these places where there’s an entrenched wealthy “ruling class” (big fish small pond). He thinks ordinary people in those places accept this social structure and are somewhat invested in believing families like the Murdaughs actually are better. He thinks it’s too threatening to the whole social fabric in these places(including where I live, which has the same dynamic) for people to admit that a “ruling class” are degenerate scumbags.

    They’re conservatives. They will defend the status quo, and the status quo is that the Murdaughs are rightfully on top. That’s his experience anyway.

  112. 112.

    Kay

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:

    Absolutely good point. We felt like it could have come in because Murdaugh relies on the drug addiction so much – it’s why he says he lied all the time- so if they could show he was stealing and just buying luxury shit that would discredit his defense.

    But, it’s always easy to second guess from the sidelines. I had a lot of sympathy for the prosecutor. Nothing is as frustrating as having a pathological liar on the stand.

  113. 113.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Kay:

    I think he’s right.

    I also think that’s why the prosecution was meticulously referencing how easy it was to lie to his clients. It’s about the only method you could use in the hopes of breaking that hammerlock.

  114. 114.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Kay:

    The interesting thing about the  “I’m just a poor addict” defense is that everybody knows how cheap Oxy is, even at the volume he was taking. There was undoubtedly some cocaine in the mix, some gambling, a lot of shady deals and funds repaid to shylocks at a high vig (for the times he had to come up with cash).

  117. 117.

    Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

    @Baud:  And we need the rethuglicans to have to step up to the microphone and say out loud they are afraid to say all PEOPLE are EQUAL, because they claim that the rights of some other people to privacy need to  be trampled so they can stay in their comfort zone/bubble.

  119. 119.

    Another Scott

    @Baud: There are smart lawyers that argue that the time limit doesn’t matter.  Wasn’t a recent amendment added about 100 years after the states ratified it?  (Different, I know.)

    Anyway, it needs to get done and the sooner the better.  If a Democratic House, Senate, and President say that the present version is done and dusted, then the courts should agree.  If not, it’s another reason to Fight for 15!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  122. 122.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    We were snickering when the state brought up that Murdaugh went to the hospital after his son’s boat crash with his dumb, pure nepotism “special prosecutor” badge sticking out of his pocket.

    “Hey! Look! I am IMPORTANT and my family is POWERFUL”

    That would definitely happen here :)

  124. 124.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Kay: I had a situation with a restraining order between my sons and my ex’s husband. The Guardian ad litem had a scheduling confilct and asked for a continuance of 1 week and sent all the lawyers involved a copy. For some reason or other, it never got filed by the circuit clerk. Just disappeared into the ether. So we didn’t go but he and their lawyer did.

    Funny how that happened.

    forgot to add that his was an old Crawford County family. His great grandpappy’s picture hung on the wall in remembrance of his time as a judge.

  126. 126.

    Kay

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    I had one of the olde family judges tell me once that the apple didn’t fall far from the tree regarding one of my juveniles in the first pretrial conference. He was referring to the fact that my client’s grandfather had been convicted of food stamp fraud. So that was very fair and just- that he had her pegged as a “criminal by blood” before she even entered the courtroom. He’s ancient now but he still comes to bar events. I was at one where one of the waitstaff asked me “how he got here” worried about how he was getting home. I said “I don’t know and I don’t care how he gets home” – I think she was shocked that I wouldn’t perform my traditional female caretaker role. Fuck him – he was always horrible and I assume he still is :)

  127. 127.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: That describes the social structure in my town too. I think Murdaugh will probably skate on the murder charges. I hope they nail the bastard to the wall on the financial crimes at least.

  129. 129.

    Matt McIrvin

    @James E Powell: I always assumed the flimsy and truncated stall doors where there in a futile attempt to police the bathrooms–provide a nominal amount of privacy while making it harder to do drugs or have sex in the stalls. They don’t want you to actually have privacy in their space.

  130. 130.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott:

    Wasn’t a recent amendment added about 100 years after the states ratified it?  (Different, I know.)

    Closer to 200. But that one didn’t have a time limit for ratification built into the resolution that proposed it (as far as I know). At least the time limit is not written into the amendment text, which may be the thing they’re hanging this on.

  134. 134.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Another Scott: At the elementary school where I went for the third and fourth grades, which was 1950s architecture, there were no doors at all on the stalls in the boys’ bathroom. I assume that was an anti-masturbationist measure but I’m sure it was also cheaper.

    At any rate, bullies and pranksters took fullest advantage of this, and my solution was to just not go–I would hold it in all day. Since I had a long bus ride across the county and came home pretty late, this occasionally resulted in accidents.

  136. 136.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    That describes the social structure in my town too.

    To understand his role in that law firm, why they didn’t press him on the money that was stolen, understand that there are lawyers in those forms who are there simply to bring in business based on their name and family standing in the community. He didn’t need a work ethic or any technical skills as a lawyer- he operates on relationships – he brings in business- and that’s why they essentially allowed him to steal from clients. His being there benefits all of them too. Not all of the Olde Family lawyers are bad lawyers but a lot of them, particularly in the later generations, get away with shit no “ordinary name” lawyer in a firm like that would because they don’t bring this “family” benefit along with them.
    The law firm will of course deny this but this is how big fish/small pond works. They knew he was sketchy. They chose not to look too hard at his behavior.

  137. 137.

    GOML

    Weissman “In some sense, both sides are right”

    Pitchbot “I can’t top this”

    Buttigeig had to be forced to do his job, they’re not testing for dioxins, and Biden’s DOJ is backing Norfolk Southern’s efforts to block lawsuits. And you’re defending the DNC?

    The corruption is bipartisan.

    The screenwriter for that lousy enviro film has a new website up. You should read it.

  138. 138.

    Madame Bupkis

    @Kay: This information changes everything!  He seems like a terrible lawyer.  I was wondering how he made so much money.  And now it all makes sense.

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